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Let's Read: The Once and Future King (Ch.10)

So, Wart is figuring out a way to convince
Kay to go with him into Hob barley’s strip and muses on his relationship with
Kay.

“It was strange, but their battle had made
them friends again, and each could look each other in the eye, with a kind of
confused affection” (93).

Translation: ‘I have been raised [Male] and
accord to a strict cult of masculinity; this cult terribly limits my ability to
interact with women and men—people in general—and those whom I grow close to
can only resolve difficulties with me, if they are likewise [Male], via
recourse to violence.’

You see this all the time in literature and
film. Has this, like, ever been the case in reality?

When I was young, I had my fair share of
scuffles with my friends—usually non-physical but sometimes physical—and I can
honestly say that no fight ever brought us closer together. This fascination
with violence as the path to peace instead of simply talking things out, has to
be one of the most rancid parts of masculinity—where else do you see such a
delimitation of personal identity? Where you can only communicate with another
[Male] by fighting and not even, truly, know what to call it? (“confused
affection.”) Reactionaries can rant all they want about ‘collectivization’ and
‘loss of identity’ but the fact remains that it is only in gender roles, and
gender itself, that we see such a monumental limitation of identity and
personal practice. Honestly, nothing else even comes close.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the
boys and their homoerotic tension as they travel into the woods. Right!

So, they walk into the woods and this wood
is old. Like, super-freaking old; the forest is nearly impenetrable due to the
vast assortment of dead trees buttressed against the living and the various
bits of uneven ground and marsh. IT sounds like a less than ideal place to even
visit. The fact that Wart and Kay freely travel to this place in search of fun,
truly is a testament to how life was shitty before the advent of video games.

But the boys bravely proceed on and before
long they encounter a seemingly mute man cutting wood. Kay is less than
pleased.

“’Pooh,’ said Kay, ‘you have
knights-in-armor, or dragons, or things like that in an adventure, not dirty
old men cutting wood’” (95).

Kay has not been on many adventures!

Adventuring 101, Kay: the adventure is
preconfigured in the always-already nature of the trivial.

Moving away from the Giant, though, Wart
and Kay continue on their trek through the woods. Apparantly, they still
believe something worth finding is hiding in this wood. Lucky for them,
however, they are in an YA adventure story, so there is, of course, something
for them to discover.

Enter: John Naylor, or ‘Little John,’ a
seven foot tall half-naked man who is resting with his dog.

Boys, this is the part of the story where
you will want to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can.

What a relief though when the story doesn’t
turn tragic. Turns out that Little John is wants to take them to the leader of
the forest, a man by the name of Robin Wood (ugh), after Kay suggests that the
mute man cutting wood from before had forewarned Little John of Wart-Kay’s
impending arrival; evidently, brash thoughts on forest communication is
something worth gushing about to one’s superiors. So the boys travel alongside
him asking questions which aren’t too interesting and that mostly relate to
trying to figure out Little John’s odd speech (which I feel is an approximation
of a Middle English dialect rendered in modern English).

At any rate, they finally arrive at a great
lime-wood tree. Perched on the top is Robin Wood with Maid Marian. Some
uninteresting banter ensues, Mr. Wood has the boys shoot at a bird with a bow
and arrow, and then the interesting stuff happens.

To make a long story short, it turns out
that Wat didn’t actually bite off Dog Boy’s nose. Dog Boy was fooling around
with a dog with Wat and he called the dog over to him; but, there was a fairy
person nearby chopping wood. Dog Boy neglected to point at the dog he had been
calling and forgetting that the fairy people all have names after beasts, and
that this nearby fairy was named Dog, the fairy chopping wood was transported
to Dog Boy instead of the Dog, and so his nose was cut clean off. Wat is
actually a harmless vegetarian who wouldn’t hurt a fly (good, so no Ableist
garbage. Nice).

Oh, also, turns out that Morgan le Fay
might be the queen of these fairies. Fairies are, evidently, among the oldest
of races and lived in Britain before even the Romans. They live in burrows and
have ancient knowledge which might be naughty. Anyways, Morgan has kidnapped
some people or animals, or something, to enchant and now Robin Wood and Kay and
Wart must try to rescue them from her castle stronghold… or something (I’m
gonna to level with ya: this whole section was poorly written. I had very little
idea what White was getting at with Morgan; maybe this was intentional in order
to keep up the mystery, but most of the time White remains cryptic about the
links and what’s happening so I only got the gist of things).

At least something is happening, I guess.
But I would like something more in the way of a plot at this point. So far it
has just been random things happening, some of which were interesting and many
of which were not. I actually hope that this rescue mission thing doesn’t last
too long since it does not sound hugely awesome, by which I mean, interesting.

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Lately, I was browsing around online and found another handy resource for aspiring medievalists.

Enter, Western Michigan University's Medieval Institute!

The site has links to an extensive book shop, scholarly journals, as well as a free download. See below for links.

General listing: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medievalpress/
Index of titles available for purchase: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalpublications/all-titles
The 'Medieval Globe' book(s): http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/ (Click on title(s) for free download)

Okay, that is all for now. Sometime soon I think that I would like to organize all of my resource links so that I, as well as you, have a concrete listing of reliable resources. Until then, we shall have to make due.